A Shout-out from M. LaFave on C4SS

The thing is, libertarianism has hardly ever had a uniform “cultural movement.” While the likes of Jeffrey Tucker, Lewellyn Rockwell and Ron Paul praise productivity and a traditional work ethic in their own right, Nick Ford’s blog, abolishwork.com, challenges the state-corporate nexus and “the Protestant/Puritan work ethic which enables the modern day work ethic to persist and destroy people’s lives.”

While the 20th century classical liberals championed the 19th century Individualists as fellow free-marketeers, at times they couldn’t have been further apart culturally, strategically and aesthetically. Consider Rothbard’s above dismissal of “Romanticist back-to-nature” types with Voltairine de Cleyre’s wistful prose:

I have never wanted anything more than the wild creatures have,—a broad waft of clean air, a day to lie on the grass at times, with nothing to do but slip the blades through my fingers, and look as long as I pleased at the whole blue arch, and the screens of green and white between; leave for a month to float and float along the salt crests and among the foam, or roll with my naked skin over a clean long stretch of sunshiny sand; food that I liked, straight from the cool ground, and time to taste its sweetness, and time to rest after tasting; sleep when it came, and stillness, that the sleep might leave me when it would, not sooner—Air, room, light rest, nakedness when I would not be clothed, and when I would be clothed, garments that did not fetter; freedom to touch my mother earth, to be with her in storm and shine, as the wild things are,—this is what I wanted,—this, and free contact with my fellows;—not to love, and lie and be ashamed, but to love and say I love, and be glad of it; to feel the currents of ten thousand years of passion flooding me, body to body, as the wild things meet. I have asked no more.